This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge is: Let There Be Light. The prompt reads, in part:

In time for the shortest days of the year (at least in the northern hemisphere), let’s give our trusty lightbulbs, flickering candles, and pedestrian street lamps their due respect.

In a new post created for this challenge, share a photo that features a light source.

Venice, April 2013: Ca’ San Toma. In April, there were barely any tourists wandering the neighbordhood.

Window of the Kitchen of the Apartment in Trieste, May 2013

This Virgin Mary, of somewaht more modern visage than the rest of the Church Figures. Notice the piles of photograph at her feet. Wonder what they’re for? This might have been in the Frari Church: self saw SO many churches in Venice, they do tend to jumble up in her head.

Infant and child-care problems are particularly pressing in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country with one of the world’s highest birthrates. The U.N. estimates that roughly 865 births occur daily in typhoon-affected communities with about 15% developing potentially life-threatening complications.

Only 18% of children in the Philippines are “fully immunized against measles, and 83% against polio, as of 2012.”

Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) killed 5,598 people and injured 26,136, according to official data.

Self is reading “Indulgence,” by Susan Perabo, from One Story (Issue No. 178):

My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking. She had dodged the bullet of lung cancer after all, she triumphantly announced to me on the phone that summer afternoon. All those years my brother and I had hassled her, lectured her, begged her, berated her (“Don’t you want to see your grandchildren graduate from college?”) — and for what? Her lungs were fine! She’d finally quit two years before, after a bitter and tumultuous relationship with patches and gum and hypnosis and electric cigarettes, but look! — there’d be no need! The long-dreaded cancer had found some other place to roost.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her. “Throw a party?” I was trembling from the inside out — my mother was dying — and furious at her for reporting her diagnosis so flippantly, as if I, too, would be so thoroughly amused by the irony that the news would just roll right off me. I looked out the kitchen window and saw my children in the backyard, their half-naked bodies slick from the sprinkler, their hair nearly sparkling in the sunlight.

Stafford Park, Redwood City: Wednesday Evening Concert

Lest dear blog readers think that a mother’s brain cancer would be enough material for one story, self would just like to assure you that Ms. Perabo has a whole bagful of these painful and unexpected traumatic injuries at her command, and in fact will dispense one just a few pages in, and then you will know just what it feels like to . . . to . . .

Self, be still! There may be dear blog readers who will want to pick up that issue of One Story (No. 178) and read it for themselves!